program note
Decasia was commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta for the occasion of European Music Month, which was held in Switzerland in 2001. The piece was conceived as an environmental symphony. Wanting to control the experience completely, I partnered with Ridge Theater, who designed and built a concert hall with an enormous, installed set and multimedia design in a cavernous, empty warehouse in Basel. Directed by Bob McGrath, the production included projections by Laurie Olinder, a set by Jim Findlay and a film element by Bill Morrison, which was later edited into an independent film with the same title.
Decasia now exists in two concert formats. The staged version completely alters the performance space, with musicians sitting on a multi-tiered set behind hanging scrims, which provide a surface for the projections and film. The audience stands or sits, surrounded by the set, engulfed in a barrage of sound and imagery.
In the concert version of Decasia, Morrison’s film is projected on a scrim, which can hang behind or in front of the orchestra.
Early in our collaboration, Morrison showed me damaged archival film that he had discovered. It was marred by corrosion and riddled by pockmarks –– the mottled remains of celluloid images. While imagining the music that might complement this film, I thought of a piano that hadn’t been tuned in many years. It is a beautiful haunting sound not easily forgotten. What is the orchestral equivalent? I wondered. I set out to make the orchestra sound like it was covered in cobwebs, with instruments that had been sitting for a hundred years, creaky and warped and deteriorated. A group of musicians happen to come by, pick them up and play. What would that sound be?
I decided to re-tune the instruments of the orchestra. For example, there are three flutes. One flute plays completely in tune; a second flute is tuned an eighth of a tone higher; and the third flute is tuned an eighth of a tone lower. When all three flutes play in unision, the sound they produce is thickened. The whole orchestra is retuned in this manner. In a sense, the music asks a group of fine orchestral musicians to play perfectly out of tune – quite a task.
The first sound heard is that of eight brake drums. The brake drum is an automobile part from a junkyard turned into a percussion instrument. The percussionist scrapes it slowly with a metal beater, creating a cloud of white noise.
Throughout Decasia, the music, like the image of Morrison’s film, is covered by layers of decayed and distorted sound. Like listening to the untuned piano, or seeing something very beautiful through a clouded surface, one can grasp for the beauty shining underneath.
